Last year, I’m in Ouray, Colorado, a place fondly known as the “little Switzerland of America,” due to it being in the center of high mountains, itself a teeny, 500 person town (give or take in the summer). The hills are riddled with closed down mine shafts, once upon a time producing streams of gold that eventually ran dry. On the other side of the hill adjacent to Rog’s parent’s (my in-laws) home sits Telluride, thirty minutes by car (right past Ralph Lauren’s 3,000 acre farm), but 12 min my truck if one takes the internal mountain road available to the miners.
An idea for a book struck me: what if all the records of the citizens of the United States were plunked right in the mountain caverns, and through some dastardly deeds of the government (who else), that information was used to hurt the population.
This novel is Incarnation, and the mines are mentioned in the book–you can even hike, or hitch a ride to see the caverns.
Another series of mountain caves exist in Utah, the creators of the repository not the government, but the Mormon church. Furthermore, the data doesn’t include just citizens of the US, but of over 150 countries–and alas, no misdeeds or ill intent. It’s all available and free, provided on-line through Familysearch.org. (and yes, these caverns are so cool, they got a mention in the book as well).
You see, anyone who does research on family members, ancestors or also in my case, people I want to know more about for my books, ends up in ancestry.com which now has partnered with familysearch.org. When I came across this video on Youtube talking about Granite Mountain Vault, I was impressed, slightly awed and sort-of pissy that my idea was, oh, 30+ years out of date/taken.
Now, if you are wondering what this means to you- other than peace of mind, you can actually go, for free, to any one of the 4,000 family history centers built by the LDS (Mormon) church around the world. Some are stand-alone buildings, others are within a church building. The volunteers are all LDS geneology-trained-range in ages and are not allowed to preach to you about the faith. If you ask, you will be referred to a missionary, so you can go in, ask your questions and get started.
Granite Mt Vault
The good news here (and I’m always in search of good news) is that if the world falls apart, trillions of records will be saved on microfiche, and I’ll always be able to find my ancestor’s records in a vault.